THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / Monterey
For Apple's 50th anniversary and 75 years of Porsche in motorsport, the two factory Porsche 963s raced at Laguna Seca in the rainbow colours a 935 K3 wore at Le Mans in 1980.
MOTORING · LIVERY
Good graphic design never really leaves. The rainbow stripes and bitten apple of Apple Computer defined the look of a generation in the 1970s and 1980s, then vanished from the products decades ago. Their force, it turns out, is intact.
At the fourth round of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, a short drive south of Cupertino, that heritage reappeared somewhere unexpected: on the flanks of two factory Porsche 963 prototypes.
The collaboration marks two milestones: Apple’s 50th anniversary and 75 years of Porsche in motorsport. It is also a meeting of two famously protective owners of intellectual property, both with enormous global reach.
Timo Resch, chief executive of Porsche Cars North America, has described a project that came together on a very compressed timeline, with marketing teams on both sides spending intense weeks aligning details across time zones, carried by a shared momentum.
The scheme was not entirely new. In 1980, Dick Barbour Racing entered a Porsche 935 converted to K3 specification at the Le Mans 24 Hours in Apple Computer colours, with Bob Garretson, Bobby Rahal and Allan Moffat sharing the wheel. This time the stripes went onto the two Porsche Penske Motorsport 963s, wrapped as a tribute to that car.
The 935 of the early 1980s had a raw quality: its jagged openings and abrupt panel transitions sat deliberately against the friendly pattern of the rainbow. The 963, aerodynamically sculpted, poses a different problem. The bands run playfully across its swollen bodywork, sweeping ahead of the wheel arches and giving way to the flat black of the tyre.
The vertical fins offered another surface for difference: one car wore a vivid fuchsia tail, the other a quieter black. The palette had to negotiate with elements that cannot move: number panels, the central cockpit, the upswept exhaust.
NACA ducts, louvred openings, communication antennae: each demanded a decision. Seen from above, the care is obvious. The stripes negotiate with every competing surface and the composition still breathes.
On a grid crowded with busy modern liveries, the Apple Porsches stood apart, clean and evocative. Choosing a retro Apple spoke not only of an old alliance but of common ground. Resch argues that both companies design with meticulous attention to detail and care about a consistent experience at every point of contact, and that partnerships of this kind build an emotional connection with newcomers as much as with existing fans.
On the stopwatch, the story belonged to someone else. The factory cars, which led for a long stretch, finished sixth and seventh after a strategy call that did not pay off. Victory went to a customer 963 run by JDC-Miller MotorSports, with Laurin Heinrich passing for the lead on the final lap, the first IMSA win for a Porsche customer team since the LMDh era began in 2023.
Forty-six years after it first went racing, the rainbow returned to the track and looked as fresh as ever. It did not win. It did not need to. Some designs are remembered long after the results are forgotten.
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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